Two years ago I surveyed an esteemed panel of industry insiders to find the best Super Bowl ads of all time. The overwhelming favorite was Apple’s “1984,” a celebrated spot that aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.

The minute-long ad, conceived by advertising agency Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott, heralded the introduction of the Macintosh personal computer and ran on television only once—“yet it generated more buzz than any other commercial ever made,” said William Gelner, executive creative director at 180 LA.

Bob Horowitz, president of Juma Entertainment and executive producer of the annual CBS show “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials,” says Super Bowl ads are successful if they accomplish one of two things. “They must entertain with clever, over-the-top--but not too silly--creative that has viewers wanting to re-tell punch lines at the water cooler the next morning. Or the commercial has to tug at the heart strings, providing an emotional connection for viewers and the corporate message,” he says “Viewers watch the game to be entertained by those 30 and 60-second commercials. If the spots don't meet those entertaining expectations, $4 million is wasted.”

Ryan Aynes, co-founder and managing director of EDGE Collective, says great ads are able to hook viewers within the first few seconds and leave them with something to think about. “Successful ads are often funny without giving into to gimmicks—and above all else, Super Bowl ads are about being creative and entertaining the audience.” A good Super Bowl Ad does not need to have an expensive production budget, but if it can connect with people on an emotional level with such things as laughter or tears, then it has done its job, he says.

“We believe that all great creative is culturally relevant and has no dead ends,” adds Sharon Napier, the chief executive of Partners + Napier. “In the context of the Super Bowl, this means that the ad creates some sort of action when the game is over – whether it’s a joining an online community, tweeting about it, or sharing it with others. Of course, at the end of the day, it has to be entertaining, but let’s not forget that the creative is in service to a brand – and it has to connect the two.”

A handful of ads, like Apple’s “1984,” Coca-Cola’s “Mean Joe Greene” and Budweiser’s “Frogs,” managed to grab our attention during the big game and kept us talking about them for decades later—but we’ve also seen some major flops throughout the years.

For instance, plenty of ads try too hard to be funny and forget that they need to tell a good story,” says Steve O’Connell, partner and executive creative Director at Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners.

Napier says the worst ads are exaggerated executions made for short-term shock value and show no respect for the consumer. “In essence, it’s creative for creative’s sake.”

According to Horowitz, bad Super Bowl commercials tend to be “too ordinary; not special--something you'd expect to see from the advertiser the other 364 days of the year.” Or, he says, the commercial message “has absolutely nothing to do with product the company is selling.”

Jason Mayo, managing director and partner at Click 3X, says viewers want one or both of two things in a Super Bowl ad: big and/or funny. “If they get neither, they get angry,” he explains. “It's okay to follow a formula for success but there needs to be a spin that speaks to the brand. If there is no connection to the brand, people walk away confused.”

Napier says one brand that has consistently produced bad Super Bowl ads is Go Daddy. “They’ve always taken a lame ‘sex sells’ approach with badly-written schmaltzy humor. But this year they’ve changed this approach so it will be interesting to see how consumers react,” she says.

Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork + Company, and author of Power Branding, agrees. “Go Daddy clearly has the worst Super Bowl commercials of all time,” he says. “It would be hard to single one out, because they've all been offensive in a slightly different way. Did they get attention? Sure. But titillation is not a strategy. This year's ad tones things down a bit, though inexplicably still includes Danica Patrick.”

Winchester concurs. “The spots that seem to run every year and take the cake for bad advertising are the Go Daddy spots. Year after year, they simply can’t resist hinting at some slightly pornographic innuendo that exploits women. An advertising strategy to turn off 51% of the population in one fell swoop seems like marketing suicide to me,” he says. “And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Go Daddy creates a spot with a woman making out with a dorky guy in what amounts to 30 seconds of gross-out. Why just denigrate women when you laugh at the stereotype of socially awkward, geeky people? It’s a marketing two-fer.”

The 2013 Go Daddy spot, “When Sexy Meets Smart,” focused on a “nerd” engaged in a long kiss with supermodel Bar Refaeli. “The idea was to generate attention and reinforce the ‘when sexy meets smart’ idea,” says Charles R. Taylor, marketing professor at Villanova School of Business. “While the ad did get noticed, social media action was overwhelmingly negative and the ad was ranked at the bottom of 2013’s ads by experts and consumers alike. The very negative reaction appears to be prompting Go Daddy, which has had outstanding success in building awareness to focus more on it its products and what it stands for going forward. The ad illustrates that getting attention is not always a good thing.”

O’Connell calls the Go Daddy spots “gratuitous, misguided, sexist, universally disliked and just plain bad.” “But hey, those spots got their name out there. And they’re gazillionaires,” he adds. “So it's one of the great enigmas of advertising.”